1.a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people."education is a right, not a privilege"

singular noun

2. You can use privilege in expressions such as be a privilege or have the privilege when you want to show your appreciation of someone or something or to show your respect.

One of the most beautiful things

in life is getting the opportunity to spend time with your loved ones. I had the great privilege to be surrounded by my family these past months while I was recovering from a bladder surgery that I had last February. The privilege of having my old woman bringing me fresh mangos and papaya every morning is by far the best and easiest pill for me to swallow.

The best and most effective treatment.

I now know that of all the medications, mindfulness and positive thinking I do; the one thing that keeps me going is the love of my family. They were the single most important tool in the box in this whole recovery process and it gives me a tremendous sense of security to know that if something goes wrong, if the shit somehow starts hitting the fan, they will be there to help me out and clean it all up.

They are f*cking amazing. Really.

My time has gone full circle down here Brazil and now it's time to go back home, but before that, I just wanted to thank them and say that I’m absolutely honored, blessed, and privileged every day to call them family and to have them around.

And it is because of them, that I grown, learned and strived to keep kicking the bucket forward, whatever the circumstances.

I am grateful for these three.

Here is to all the privileges we have daily folks. The privilege of time, the privilege of love and the privilege of being able to experiment all this.

the power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched;elasticity.

ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like;buoyancy.

I am currently down in Brazil where I am waiting to get a second opinion regarding a bladder surgery that I might be entitled to. So resilience-learning has been a full-time business these days.

I am getting a master-degree in this resilience business.

I have adapted well to many areas but still have others to tackle, others issues related to my spinal cord injury. One of the consequences of this is the inability to control my bladder.

I have tried a lot of managing methods and I have been managing it with a suprapubic catheter for the past year. Not a very good method as I had a total of 7 UTIs this year and my bladder had now shrunk and it is the size of a walnut.

Due to that, I have been dealing with a lot of pain, anxiety and autonomic dysreflexia, that is another condition you are granted if your injury is above the TH6 vertebrae.

The last 2 months was definitely the hardest I endured since my accident. It’s been a bit tough. Mentally and physically. A big chunk of it I spent feeling sick and visiting doctors to try to sort stuff out.

The other thing that is keeping me in the survival mode is neuropathic pain. I have neuropathic pain every day. All the time. I have pain right now and it is very hard to control.

I have tried everything from Jesus Christ to sweet Mary Jane

and nothing seems to help. Conventional doctors keep prescribing me antidepressants and opioids. Gabapentin, lyrica, morphine and all other kinds of narcotics.

All these drugs, apart for decreasing the pain it also decreases my ability to be myself. This kind of medication gives me strong cognitive side effects and make me feel like a zombie. Literally.

All the hard achieved level of independence I have today, to live by myself, to work, to exercise, to socialize and to study seems to be lost when I take these drugs as I am not able to function. So I pretty much gave up on all of them. I stopped taking all the medicines.

I would much harder live in pain, be myself, and take a more natural approach towards it such as mindfulness, adapted yoga and exercise. Sometimes it works and these currently are the main types of treatments I am having.

Sometimes (most of the time) I take an even more natural approach towards it. I say fuck all to all the world and lie down in my bed and wait until it goes away.

I read books, I watch YouTube videos, I study, I work, I do what I can. It’s a very lonely experience.

Lonely not because you are alone, I actually got used it. Lonely because you kind of withdraws yourself from everything else.

Your friends call you to ask how you are and it kind of gets boring to repeat yourself over and over that you have pain and bring the conversation down. I think I had enough of that. So I am always fine. Even if I don’t do anything or go anywhere whenever I am trying to deal with it.

I have been trying to transform all these alone-times and setbacks into personal growth.

Learning how to cope with this made me gain confidence and be better prepared for life somehow. I don’t think I was born resilient. I definitely learned through exposure to adversity.

Adversity + resilience = personal growth

Every day when I wake up, I meditate for 20 minutes and with or without pain, I try to look up for the things I am grateful for, and one of the positive things I have is resilience.

I am grateful that I am getting the chance to learn all this.

Resilience has the capacity to sustain my good mood and hope throughout my shit days. It has changed the way I feel about myself and others. For the better.

And that is a good thing.

Focus on the good and lets move forward.

Be well folks.

Roddy X

“Often times, God will put a Goliath in your life, to bring out the David in you”

• 1 Recognition and enjoyment of the good qualities of someone or something. • 1.1Gratitude. • 2 A full understanding of a situation. OriginLate 15th century: from French appréciation, from late Latin appretiatio(n-), from the verb appretiare set at a price, appraise 

"We think too much about what goes wrong and not enough about what goes right in our lives. Of course, sometimes it makes sense to analyze bad events so that we can learn from them and avoid them in the future. However, people tend to spend more time thinking about what is bad in life than is helpful. Worse, this focus on negative events sets us up for anxiety and depression. One way to keep this from happening is to get better at thinking about and savoring what went well."

Grandpa was quite good at doing it, he was the appreciator master. Grandpa was a spiritual man. One of the first memories regarding meditation and appreciation came from him. I remember being around to spend our school holidays with him. We used to sit around the dinner table every Wednesday night and he used to thank everything and everyone that came or crossed our way that week. The old man used to remember every single moment, every single detail. - thanks for the rain yesterday, thanks about the spaghetti we ate last Sunday, thanks for the water, thanks for this and thanks for that. We used to thank everything and meditate around the table.

It was beautiful.

Fast forwarding time, I jumped myself deeply into meditation when I started dealing with neuropathic pain, that can sometimes literally also be called pain in the ass! Neuro-pain is not fun and one of tools I use to deal with it is mindfulness meditation. I use an app called Headspace.

Headspace has a series of guided meditation sessions and one of the pack is called appreciation.

With so much going on in life, it is quite difficult sometimes to be present, to appreciate what is going on around us, what we already got. Very often we tend to look at the future thinking what might be or we look at the past thinking what could have been.

This quick exercise is designed to help us to really spend more time in the present. To cultivate a genuinely sense of gratitude for what we have got right now.

Even if that's a pain the ass.

As you go into this day, try to pause during the day for at least 10 or 20 seconds, get yourself comfortable, be aware of your breath and ask yourself;

-Who or What do you appreciate most in your life have right now?

While asking yourself that, even if you are not new to meditation, try to maintain a beginners mind, as you are doing it for the very first time and always ask the question as you never asked the question before, as you are asking another person, not knowing, expecting or anticipating what the answer would be. When you do the exercise this way it creates a spacious mind which appreciation can naturally arise.

Take the time to notice when you do that how the moods shift, how it changes perhaps the busyness of the mind, how it perharps shift the attention or the focus on a particularly emotion or feeling. Being fully aware of how this feeling of appreciation can really allow us to be more present in the world, more connected with the people around us.

Once you familiarize yourself with the physical senses and the feeling, try to be aware of how you feel and aware of that intention to carry the quality of appreciation with you into the day, to remind yourself periodically throughout the day, of what that feeling was like.

Remind yourself that life is a gift. Life goes quick. Appreciate the moment . Appreciate what you already have.

Be well folks and keep your heads high. There is good in this world.

Roddy X

“We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.” 

I used to read some of Charles Bukowski's poems in my mid-twenties. While Jack Kerouac (another great American poet) used to make me want to hit the road and go traveling, reading Bukowski always made me want to have a drink and somehow, to rebel. His nothing-to-lose truthfulness on his poems made him a cult hero. At least for me in my drunk mid-twenties years.

When I first read The Laughing Heart, there was a rebellious, hopeful and strong sentiment about this poem that always made me kick the ass out of fear, and somehow do what I wanted. Even if in some of these decisions were accompanied by my coffee cup full of red wine and a few chupitos. Just like Bukowski himself. I was doing what I wanted.

Well, my twenties are long gone, and so are the chupitos, but the poetry stayed.

Bukowski's The Laughing Heart poem is one of my all-time-favourite and it continues to touches me deeply. It is an amazing piece of poetry.

Here it is;

The Laughing Heart

"your life is your life

don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

be on the watch.

there are ways out.

there is light somewhere.

it may not be much light but

it beats the darkness.

be on the watch.

the gods will offer you chances.

know them.

take them.

you can’t beat death but

you can beat death in life, sometimes.

and the more often you learn to do it,

the more light there will be.

your life is your life.

know it while you have it.

you are marvelous

the gods wait to delight

in you."

by Charles Bukowski

The quote “Clubbed into dank submission” is a feeling that I can relate to pretty well, dealing with depression and the occasional sadness that knocks my door from time to time, sometimes it’s very difficult to remember that your life really is your life to live.

This poem is one of the powerful tools that I use to boost my mood and lift myself up. It has helped me through some grey moments. It has made me get up in the morning and do stuff, it reminds me that there is hope out there. There is a light somewhere. That your life is yours to live, know it while you have it. You are marvelous and this poem is a beauty.

Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you dont know how great you can be. How much you can love. What you can accomplish. And what your potential is.

— Anne Frank

Summertime was a season of change for me, so I thought it was time to share a little life update with you all.

It was a summer of good times and good news.

I started off with a summer camp in south of Sweden for folks with spinal cord injuries. I enrolled myself in a rehabilitation program that combined physical therapies with skill-building activities and counseling. I had the chance to meet a bunch of inspirational people that has gone or are going through the same shit and also I had the opportunity to learn a bunch of new stuff. Do you remember when I wrote about milestones? Well, my friend, let me tell you something. The 'Milestone' business was booming during those warm and long summer days.

I relearned how to swim and I also how to jump "daredevil style" for the first time in the sea. I swam by myself for about 10 minutes and got back to the deck and back to the chair. All by myself.

Another good stuff that happened is that I increased my hours at Funkibator and also continue to develop the project on accessibility. I really want to create an easy way to share accessibility while on the road. Let's see what happens.

I also gradually decreased all my medication to zero. Null. Nada. Niente. Ingenting. This made a huge difference in my life because I started to think clearer and to have more energy. Stop taking Lyrica and baclofen consequently gave me more neuro pain and spasticity, but I kind of have a good control of my spasticity doing daily stretches and adapted yoga. The neuro pain still a pain in the ass, and that's the thing I am currently working on.

Lastly, I also have traveled by myself to France, Germany and England and could check out their accessibility. Apart of all the fun and the excitement of being traveling again I learned a lot of new stuff. I am becoming more and more wheelchair street wise. Which leads to this last video;

Many milestones were collected during the last summer and even though, sometimes it feels that we are moving very slowly, it makes me glad to know that we are moving forward.

"My plans have been drawn, and goals have been set. The road to follow my dream is becoming clearer than ever in this 'slow pace' and beautiful life of mine"

With all the constant change of seasons that happens in our life, to keep things in perspective is the key.

Everything depends on the way you look at it.

Here is an example; Few days after my injury mum and I were talking about what happened, and I remember when she said that she thought that it's was a good thing that it happened close to her place, instead of somewhere around Peru or Bolivia, where I would not have had the same assistance.

When she said that we changed the situation by changing the thought. Whatever feeling we had that moment was replaced with a beautiful feeling of thankfulness.

The glass was half full at that moment.

Perspective changes everything.

You can turn a unpleasant situation into something positive. Problems can turn into a solution. It makes you feel better and what seems like loss can be seen as opportunity just by changing the way you look at it. How you perceive the situation really matters and depending on what you focus on, it can bring reality into your life.

For me, its much better and easier to keep things in perspective, to trust that there always will be a better and another way, to see things differently and in a way that lifts my spirit up, in a way that reminds me that whatever happens, my glass would still be half full.

The glass is half full.

And it's a pretty beautiful glass.

The "Invitation" is a very beautiful poem that I read somewhere during my rehabilitation. My friends sent me a lot of books, some of them even sent me a shoe box full of it. It was very kind and thoughtful of them as I had plenty of time to read. Some of the books they sent me were about meditation and spirituality. And in one of them I read this:

The Invitation

"It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of future pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true.I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day and if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours or mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "yes!"

It doesn't interest me who you know, or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with your and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”

by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

I always come back to it, it is very inspiring.

The poem reminds me that I need to make the most of my life. At first, I thought the poem was written as a letter from one person to another but after reading it more than once, it seems to me that it could also be a letter from you to yourself. At least the parts I can understand. That's some deep stuff over there. And I always ask myself; Is it really possible to be honest to ourselves as the poem suggests? In the world we live in?

I have no idea, but we must give it a go.

We must try.

Roddy X

What’s the point in being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?

Everything passesEverything changesJust do what you think you should do

— Bob Dylan

The road is full of curves and it goes forward

Back in 2010 while living in North West London, I was bartending in a pretty cool bar and I was also taking some workshops of documentary making at London City University. That year, to skip a piece of the winter, I decided to spend 1 month in Cuba. Apart from the tourist resorts destinations, I covered up a good chunk of the island in February.

Having spent the last 3 years prior that sharing a house (Casambuca) with 2 Argentinean, friends of mine, I was speaking ‘Portunhol’ quite well and I could interact more with the locals. I met a lot of interesting folks, most of them were either a musician or a doctor. No joke.

I remember talking to a lot of folks one night at 'Casa de La Trova' down in Santiago de Cuba, and what made me really think was that most of the people I met there, were happy. I don't mean 6/7 mojitos happy as I was most of the time, I mean proper happy. The funny thing is that some of them seem to have a fine amount of that on Monday mornings too.

I started to wonder

Hang on a minute! Shall I study medicine, become a doctor and drive a taxi as a second job or become a musician and have a second job as a tour guide and received second-hand t shirts as payments?

Both of it had the kind of happiness I was looking for. Any of them would do really as I remember being so tired of self-criticism and self-judgments, nothing wasn't really good and really satisfying. Obviously, I didn't know back then what I know today, and being flooded with information and opportunities didn't help me either.

I am not glamorizing communism and poverty, but Cuba's raw simplicity made me question myself if I really needed to chase all the stuff I was chasing. Why was I never satisfied and being so hard on myself? What is it that you need to be happy? I had countless booze filled conversations with my friends on that topic.

I continue to wander and I start to research.

Anyways, I put the documentary making course inside my Ikea blue bag full of stuff that I started and never finished and decided to truly chase what I really wanted. One thing I knew for sure, I didn't want to be part of the highly competitive and comparative society I was in. At least not full time. I got bored of it.

I changed roads

Soon after that I also realized that to choose what you love and actually follow it its a pretty difficult business. Sometimes you love a lot of stuff, sometimes you don't love stuff enough. While I was most in doubt, I started chasing what made me the happiest. And even if that sounds silly, immature, naive, hard to achieve and Impossible at first. I kind of knew that If I was chasing something that was meaningful to me I would stop being so hard on myself.

I knew I could do anything from flipping burgers to pourin' pints that It would be acceptable to me. Not that there is something wrong on pourin' pints, I actually love it, but as I was getting older (age wise) I had a kind of pressure on me saying that I wasn't good enough. Somehow knowing that at least I was doing that to achieve something bigger, I felt better and stop caring if what others would think of it.

Fuck it, let's go traveling!

Since then I have tried to spent every penny I make on travel. I did a ton of different things in the past years, I worked as a bartender, as a bar manager, did some gardening, I was DJing 'hock and holl' on weekends, worked in factories, sold art paints online and much more.

I used to take long holidays of 2, 3 and sometimes 4 months and go traveling somewhere to continue my research.

Sometimes fear of me getting old without any financial stability would knock my door but the experiences I was getting from the road made my life a lot richer.

The road that had a large curve in Cuba. The same road that sometimes gets dirty, dark and rainy and more curves. Sometimes also gets blue skies days and has a giant ball of fire illuminating everything around.

The road changes. We change. It all changes. All the time

The same road taught me that the only and true sense of responsibility we actually need to make sure to have is to keep on driving, moving, going forward, toward that imaginary goal you created with all the little things you love that makes you a better and and a happier person. We can slow down, drive only 5, 10 km per hour, and if something happens and you must stop, stop. It's okay. Have a look around. Once you feel like driving again you drive. But try drive towards something that makes you happy.

What is it that makes you happy?

Think about it. And in case you don't know or have any doubts, hit the road.

milestoneˈmʌɪlstəʊn/nounplural noun: milestones1. a stone set up beside a road to mark the distance in miles to a particular place.2. a significant stage or event in the development of something.

The road consists in small milestones.

After living in a Rehab center for 3,5 months and then back in Brazil with mum for about 6 months, I moved back to Sweden and started living by myself. I remember when I moved all my stuff to my new apartment and close the doors behind me, I remember when I went to the supermarket by myself, the first time I cooked Mexican and the first time I changed my duvet cover.

Every time time did something for the first time I remember going to bed super happy like a little child that climbed a mango tree for the first time!

The funny thing is that only after losing all this little things that seem so insignificant and I used to take it for granted, I started valorizing them.

This is why I feel grateful about my injury. Somehow, I am becoming happier with my small (and most of the time, ‘insignificant’) milestones. I am learning how to appreciate the small things, the little stuff, the stuff you don't think about if you don't need to think about it.

Don’t take me wrong, spinal cord injury still is and always will be shit, but I wonder if I would have the same level of life acceptance, self awareness and patience if I had not been injured. Probably not. So thats a good thing.

Talking about good things

Roddy 01 X 00 Spinal cord injury

Last October I went to one of my best friend's wedding, in Mexico.

I confess that I was quite afraid and a bit nervous but I left my apartment door, took a cab, 2 trains, 3 planes and 32 hours later I was arriving in Guadalajara, I had a backpack hanging on the back of my wheelchair and one in my lap. I had a few issues but I did it all by myself. I was super happy. On this same trip, my friends helped me to surf for the first time, I danced for the fist time and I also experienced a hurricane for the first time.

I came back to Sweden with a backpack full of milestones and it was when I started beating depression, it was when I realised that with a good planning traveling still possible.

That's what traveling does to you.

Soon after that I started building this website and also doing some research to find out what was left on the plate for me.

I found out that they have a 'disabled-friendly' wagon from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian express and also a rental car company that rents out hand control driven cars down in New Zealand. Fuck yeah!

There is a 'fuck yeah!' feeling that pops up every time you discover that you are still able to do the stuff you love. Sometimes you get it every week, sometimes everyday. And I feel very grateful to be able to experience some of those from time to time.

Every day there is little something to be grateful for.

When I think of driving in New Zealand I think of something that for me, today, right now, its huge! It's far away. It's a distant goal.

And the goal is not really the goal; the goal, is just an imaginary point that you create to have some kind of direction. What really matters is the daily, small insignificant things that you do, those ones that brings you small doses of instant inner happiness and gratitude. Small daily doses of 'fuck yeahs!'.

The goal is just there, the real and the Important stuff is the road. The road that leads to it. When Kerouac quoted 'the road is life', I believe he was right, the road is what has the most value, and by the road I mean the journey, the small daily milestones toward something that today, for you, Is big.

I believe that If you can still collect small milestones every now and then and be grateful for them, you are winning.

Both thumps up.

My milestone this week will be to start going twice a week to Funkibator, the NGO where I am currently working. It's kind of a Rehabilitation Program in a working environment, where I am learning what I can still do, how much I can work, how long I can sit still in my wheelchair before my spasticity goes crazy and stuff like that.

Funkibator is a place where everyone with a disability or a health condition has a job that suits their needs, it’s really amazing because it enable folks to take control of their lives, do stuff and become more independent.

It's all set to be a beautiful week.

I hope yours would be too.

Enjoy the road folks, celebrate your small milestones, enjoy the little things, be a winner.

The road for me is where life happens.

Firstly I must say that I am still quite brand new on this “living with spinal cord injury, blogging and wheelchair travelling” and as amongst many other things in life, I will learn it during the process, while making it. I am glad I figured out what I am gonna do, now I just need to figure out how I am gonna make this happen, but that is the fun part.

This is kick off journey where I am gonna blog about going back to the road.

I hope there will be someone out there that will benefit and learn something from it.